Comments on: Userland templates for Plone – template engine abstraction layer for Python

By: Petri Savolainen

Petri Savolainen — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 10:44:52 +0000

If you’re talking about userland variable substitution a’la mailmerge in ms word, why not just simply write a new portal transform?

By: Mikko Ohtamaa

Mikko Ohtamaa — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:16:37 +0000

You can use string.Template as a backend. But you still need to have a way to map context object to template variables.

I have found out that simple strings are not enough in real life. I wouldn’t have gone through to make this exercise just for fun.

By: Malthe

Malthe — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:33:36 +0000

Right, “string.Template“ is fast and simple and it could be used lazily, such that values would only be computed when requested.

By: Jon Stahl

Jon Stahl — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:38:06 +0000

I can definitely see some use cases (mainly involving PloneFormGen or S&D, as Mikko suggests) for doing simple variable substitutions in Kupu.

e.g. on a Thank You page, the user would like to write the page in Kupu but be able to stick in form variables.

By: Mikko Ohtamaa

Mikko Ohtamaa — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:20:56 +0000

> writing templates through the web

It’s about using templates in Kupu.

By: Martin Aspeli

Martin Aspeli — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:18:18 +0000

I’m not sure I’m reading this correctly, but if you’re talking about writing templates through the web with Kupu, then I don’t think that’s a use case Plone really should cater for by default.

The only use case I think could make sense, would be simple variable substitutions. In this case, string.Template probably makes sense – I certainly wouldn’t invent a whole pagetemplate abstraction library.

However, I think a better solution would be to use HTML markers, e.g. . These would be transformed on page rendering to insert the appropriate values.

Martin